Indexing as Engaging Oral History Research: Using OHMS
to “Compose History” in the Writing Classroom
Douglas A. Boyd, Janice W. Fernheimer, Rachel Dixon
Oral History Review, Volume 42, Issue 2, Summer/Fall 2015, pp. 352-367
(Article)
Published by Oxford University Press
For additional information about this article
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/ohr/summary/v042/42.2.boyd.html
Access provided by Smith Library @ Southwestern University (8 Sep 2015 16:45 GMT)
Indexing as Engaging Oral History
Research: Using OHMS to “Compose
History” in the Writing Classroom
Douglas A. Boyd, Janice W. Fernheimer, and Rachel Dixon
Abstract: This article presents a case study about a recent collaboration between the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History at the University of Kentucky
Libraries and a professor at the University of Kentucky to use the Oral History
Metadata Synchronizer (OHMS)—an open source, free online application originally designed for enhancing archival access to oral history—as a pedagogical
tool to elevate student engagement with oral history in the classroom. The
authors—the oral history center director and creator of OHMS; a professor in the
Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and Digital Studies (WRD); and an undergraduate WRD student assigned the task of using OHMS to index oral history—reflect
on this collaboration from their own perspectives. This collaboration between the
archive and the classroom at the University of Kentucky provides an innovative,
experiential learning model for engaging undergraduate students in the critical
thinking and research aspects of working with oral history, and the article reflects
on the impact and potential for future applications of this model.
Keywords: archive, digital humanities, Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History,
OHMS (Oral History Metadata Synchronizer), pedagogy, students, University of
Kentucky
For decades, teachers have used oral history in the classroom to engage and inspire students, most often by involving students in the practice of interviewing.
However, digital innovations such as free and easy-to-use multimedia editing,
production, analysis, and dissemination technologies create a multifaceted, collaborative context where student intersections with oral history, digital history, and
the digital humanities are no longer limited to the interview experience. Students
can now seamlessly explore the interpretive, analytic, and compositional roles of
editors, digital storytellers, and documentarians using oral histories to tell new or
doi:10.1093/ohr/ohv053. Advance Access publication 20 July 2015
The Oral History Review 2015, Vol. 42, No. 2, pp. 352–367
C The Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Oral History Association.
V
All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: [email protected]
Indexing as Engaging Oral History Research | 353
untold stories in innovative ways. Emerging scholarship reflects on how oral history is “shaping pedagogical practices in the 21st century classroom”;1 however, a
discussion of teachers and faculty engaging archival partners to use oral history in
course design is nearly absent from the current scholarly conversation.
Although archived oral histories possess tremendous opportunity for teaching and learning, this potential is tempered by the challenges posed by their
comparative lack of accessibility compared to other types of primary sources.
Generally, archived oral histories that lack comprehensive metadata or transcripts
remain difficult to discover and time-consuming to use, especially in the classroom environment where efficiency is so crucial. This article presents a case
study of a recent collaboration between the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral
History at the University of Kentucky Libraries and a professor in the
Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and Digital Studies (WRD) at the University of
Kentucky to use the Oral History Metadata Synchronizer (OHMS)—a digital tool
originally designed for enhancing archival access to oral history—as a pedagogical tool. We reflect on the collaboration from the perspectives of the oral history
center director and creator of OHMS, the professor, and one of the undergraduate students assigned the task of using OHMS to index oral history.
In their article “Using Online Video Oral Histories to Engage Students in
Authentic Research,” Jill Goodman Gould and Gail Gradowski question current
pedagogical models for teaching with oral history, stating they have found “little
evidence that professors are developing sophisticated assignments that ask for
effective critical interpretation and require rigorous research skills.”2 The Nunn
Center-WRD 112/205-OHMS collaboration at the University of Kentucky provides an experiential learning model for engaging undergraduate students in the
critical thinking and research that Gould and Gradowski advocate. We argue that
using OHMS to index archived oral histories, both video and audio, provides a
compelling way to answer their call for university professors “to take fuller advantage of . . . oral history’s inherently engaging properties.”3
Dr. Douglas A. Boyd, Director, Louie B. Nunn Center
for Oral History
I became director of the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History at the University
of Kentucky Libraries in 2008. In an attempt to address and overcome oral history’s archival challenges of discovery and usability, I led the team that created
OHMS, a new digital system for enhancing access to online oral history. The
1
Glenn Whitman, “Guest Editor’s Introduction,” Oral History Review 38, no. 1 (2011): i–ii.
Jill Goodman Gould and Gail Gradowski, “Using Online Video Oral Histories to Engage Students in
Authentic Research,” Oral History Review 41, no. 2 (2014): 341–350.
3
Ibid., 345.
2
354 | BOYD ET AL.
OHMS Indexing Module allows the archivist to create metadata at the segment or
story level, including “time stamp (auto-filled), title, partial transcript, keywords,
subjects, description, hyperlinks, and GPS coordinates.”4 With an index, users are
given an efficient, integrated browse-and-search mechanism that connects to the
corresponding moment in the online digital audio or video interview. Perhaps the
most familiar metaphor comes from the navigational structure of a book. As demonstrated in Figure 1, the OHMS index provides the browsability of a table of
contents combined with the nuanced searchability of a digital index.
Since the creation of the OHMS Indexing Module in 2011, indexing has become the primary focus of the Nunn Center’s access strategy. In 2014, the
Nunn Center indexed over nine hundred hours of oral history interviews, for one
tenth the cost of transcription. Yet the advantages of indexing go far beyond
just cost savings. Since the creation of an index involves intense focus, critical
thought, and the mapping of complex natural language to understandable concepts, an index created in OHMS, presented to the user via the OHMS Viewer,
yields an effective discovery and navigation tool for the online researcher when
compared to the transcript. The key-word search of a verbatim transcript points
only to what was said, not necessarily to what was meant. Since indexes attempt
to account for both the natural language and what was meant by it, the resulting index of an online oral history interview becomes a more meaning-focused
archival access point for the online user.5 In case examples where the interview
is discussing important historical moments (segregation, for example) but is not
using the exact language, an index provides greater access to the content and
historical connections than a verbatim transcript would.
When designing the OHMS indexing functionality, I focused my attention
on the creation of a back-end system that trained archivists and information
professionals so they could log in and create segment-level metadata to enhance
access to their online oral history interviews. In retrospect, I realize that I did not
initially conceptualize OHMS with the idea of anyone other than trained professionals utilizing the OHMS indexing process. Based on my experiences with undergraduates and graduate assistants employed by the Nunn Center and trained
to use OHMS, I began to sense the potential outreach and experiential learning
opportunities the system offered. Many of these student employees hired to index had previously worked primarily with transcripts. These students were not
metadata professionals, yet, when trained to use OHMS, they produced comprehensive and insightful indexes. Additionally, they provided valuable feedback
while I was grappling with the construction of indexing best practices.
4
Doug Boyd, “OHMS: Enhancing Access to Oral History for Free,” Oral History Review 40, no. 1(2013): 95–106.
Doug Lambert and Michael Frisch, “Meaningful Access to Audio and Video Passages: A Two-Tiered
Approach for Annotation, Navigation, and Cross-Referencing within and across Oral History Interviews,” in Oral
History in the Digital Age, ed. Doug Boyd et al. (Washington, DC: Institute of Museum and Library Services,
2012), http://ohda.matrix.msu.edu/2012/06/meaningful-access-to-audio-and-video-passages-2/
5
Indexing as Engaging Oral History Research | 355
Fig. 1. Sample index segment in the OHMS Viewer.
Repeatedly, student employees would convey to me that they enjoyed engaging
in the OHMS indexing process far more than working with transcripts.
Given student employees’ positive reactions to indexing, in 2012 I began to
experiment with using OHMS indexing as a pedagogical tool in my graduate and
undergraduate courses. I began assigning students the task of indexing unprocessed oral history interviews. Both undergraduate and graduate courses yielded
excellent results, suggesting a new model for using OHMS to engage students
with oral history, providing a platform for students to interact with primary sources in exciting new ways. As the creator of OHMS, I found it easy and natural to
design classroom assignments that paralleled preexisting Nunn Center workflows.
I created the assignment, I adapted the syllabus, and I knew the workings of
OHMS better than most. Recognizing that there would be challenges for implementing the use of OHMS as a pedagogical tool in classrooms other than mine,
it was time to seek out a campus partner to prototype the model.
Dr. Janice W. Fernheimer, Associate Professor of
Writing, Rhetoric, and Digital Studies
As a rhetorician interested in teaching students to write for public audiences, I
was attracted to the public nature of an assignment associated with OHMS
356 | BOYD ET AL.
because of the many possibilities it provided for learning about local cultural
contexts, anticipating audience needs, and engaging with a digital public sphere
in an intellectually meaningful way. I have been teaching first-year and required
writing courses for more than a decade, and one of the key challenges of these
courses in general and at University of Kentucky in particular is to get students
excited about the course objectives: to better understand that writing can have
real consequences within and beyond the classroom, to help students become
rhetorically aware of their own writing and research processes, and to become
better equipped both to analyze targeted audiences and to address their writing
to those audiences to accomplish specific goals. I have wrestled with a variety of
approaches, but have often found that it can be very challenging to get students to recognize that writing does important work in the world. This is especially true in required writing courses where students from all across campus end
up in a class that they have selected based on the meeting times that fit with
their schedule and the need to fulfill the requirement rather than on a deepseated interest in the course material. It is even harder to convince them they
are capable of doing this type of work with their writing and that such work is
worth doing. In an attempt to have students generate a more public type of
writing, I began to look for ways to interject such required writing with muchneeded real-world assignments and consequences.
After connecting with Douglas A. Boyd, director of the Nunn Center, we
launched a plan to have students in two different lower-level writing courses
work with archived oral histories in several ways. One of the courses, WRD 112,
was an accelerated/honors version of the two-course, first-year writing sequence
condensed into one semester, and the second course, WRD 205, was a
sophomore-level writing class designed to fulfill students’ graduation writing requirement. Both courses are designed to prepare students to produce rigorous
academic writing that requires research and rhetorical savvy; consequently, they
are designed to teach information literacy skills and emphasize writing as a recursive process involving revision. Each course was paired with one of the following collections of oral histories related to ethnic or multicultural experiences
in Lexington:
•
•
Ethnicity in Lexington (Multi-culturality) Oral History Project (http://www.
kentuckyoralhistory.org/series/18815/ethnicity-lexington-multi-culturalityoral-history-project)
Voices from behind the Counter Oral History Project (http://www.kentuck
yoralhistory.org/collections/voices-behind-counter-oral-history-project)
The former consisted mostly of interviews with Lexington immigrants from a variety of backgrounds as well as interviews with individuals from religious and
ethnic minority communities. The latter collection of interviews was created by
Indexing as Engaging Oral History Research | 357
author Rosie Moosnick, whose book, Arab and Jewish Women in Kentucky:
Stories of Accommodation and Audacity, is based on the oral histories she collected from Jewish and Arab shopkeepers in Kentucky. A third set of interviews,
the Lexington Jewish Community Oral History Project, http://kentuckyoralhis
tory.org/collections/lexington-jewish-community-oral-history-project, which includes twenty-four interviews from the Lexington Jewish community members
of Temple Adath Israel (the local Reform synagogue), provided an opportunity
for students who enjoyed and skillfully accomplished their initial oral history indexing assignment to earn extra credit by indexing an additional interview or
portion of an interview. By using a combination of required and extra-credit assignments, we were able to get three collections, and the seventy-five interviews
contained within them, indexed, processed, and made publicly available within a
semester’s time. Given the disparate, albeit related, content of the collections
and the limitations imposed by a sixteen-week semester, the completion of
seventy-five interview indexes in such a short period of time suggests that this
model offers a mutually beneficial undergraduate research experience. First- and
second-year students, who normally might not have the opportunity to interact
with primary resources until they reach more advanced courses in their respective
majors, are introduced to the richness of oral history, while the Nunn Center
benefits from an increased number of indexes and the access they provide.
Although the students enrolled—honors first-year writing students and students who needed to fulfill the writing requirement to graduate—constitute two
different student populations, the assignment sequence was the same for both
courses because they were both required lower-division writing courses. The sequence was designed to fully integrate the oral history collections into the overall writing course goals:
1. The first assignment required students to listen to and rhetorically analyze
the oral history interview. This assignment asked students to interpret the
archive and get familiar with a specific interview—they listened closely for
the rhetorical choices made by both interviewer and interviewee and employed traditional rhetorical terms such as ethos, pathos, and logos as tools
for analysis to determine how the interviewer and interviewee collaborated
to construct the interview and the stories it related.6
2. The second assignment required students to use OHMS to index the oral
history they worked on for the first assignment. This assignment expected
students to become researchers and listen to the interview from a researcher’s point of view. What information would be most important for
6
Ethos, pathos, and logos are the rhetorical appeals based on Aristotelian rhetoric. While writing textbooks
and instructors vary in how they introduce these concepts to undergraduates, usually they are explained as, respectively, appeals to character/credibility/ethics, appeals to emotion, and appeals to logic or reasoning.
358 | BOYD ET AL.
researchers to know about? They had to make choices and translate the interviewee’s many rapid subject changes into broader conceptual terms that
connected to larger historical narratives.
3. The final assignment was collaborative and asked students to join forces
with other students who had worked on topically related interviews to historically contextualize them and create a short, “This American Life”-style
audiocast aimed at a public audience. This assignment required students to
synthesize what they had learned from the first two assignments and present the material in an accessible way for a broad audience.
Since the overall learning outcomes for the course were writing-focused,
the assignments were designed to help students acquire a deeper understanding
of audience by asking them to become familiar not only with the interviews
themselves, but also with the larger historical and contextual issues they raised,
and ultimately to make both more easily searchable and accessible for various
publics. Specifically, the second assignment asked students to imagine an audience of researchers who might be interested in the interview and to index the
interview with this audience in mind, thus making the finer-grained historical
points available and searchable for a broad audience. Students thus had to put
themselves in the place of the researcher, imagining and calling attention to the
information they deemed most important in the interviews. What types of information might be valuable and for what types of scholars? Student reflective essays suggest this assignment was unfamiliar, challenging, and yet also
rewarding. One student, Jessica Kidwell, calls attention both to the challenges
and rewards of such an assignment:7
The biggest challenge that I faced while indexing was categorizing the transcription of the interviews into key words and phrases. I was unsure of how
to take the words that were being said and turn them into something searchable. Often times a lot of information was given in a matter of thirty seconds
and I didn’t know how I was going to make it easily accessible for researchers.
To solve this problem I ended up using a couple [of] exact words from the
segment along with categorizing those words into a larger concept.8
Kidwell goes on to detail her process:
I would then look at what was being talked about and turn it into a larger
concept. . . . Overall, while the indexing ended up being a bit harder than
7
All student work has been included with students’ permission.
Jessica Kidwell, “The Struggles with Indexing,” Student Paper, WRD 112 (University of Kentucky,
October 8, 2013), 3.
8
Indexing as Engaging Oral History Research | 359
I imagined it being, it was a project that I really enjoyed doing. It is a really
amazing feeling to know that by doing this, I am helping someone else’s
story be told. Without indexing, a lot of interviews would never be discovered. It is extremely fulfilling to know that I had a hand in changing that.9
Another student, Joel Parker, focused on the responsibility that such an assignment demanded:
Deciding which parts of someone’s life story are most important to show
others is an incredibly intimidating idea. Not only did I have to create logical separation to make the interview easy to navigate—I had to decide
that certain parts of the interview weren’t as important as others.10
Specifically, though the interviewee thought his time at Rice University
could be one of the most important times in his life in his opinion, I had
to decide that it wasn’t as important because he only mentioned it a few
times, whereas he talks about Scotland and visits throughout his
interview.11
Parker concluded the reflective essay with the following insight:
Both the difficulty of condensing an hour and twenty minutes that detailed most of Fairweather’s [the interviewee’s] life into fifteen short titles
and deciding which parts of his life were important to tag made this seemingly easy task a challenge that made me think about the importance that
words play in describing someone’s life—especially when they are
limited.12
Another student, Sarah Coffman, reflects on the challenges that “mapping natural language” presents:
I encountered my first problem when trying to select keywords that would
represent the major themes being discussed within the segment (http://
goo.gl/fSq2Xl). I had to think critically about the larger concepts Bologna
and Ocelli’s comments related to, and decide what topics would be most
beneficial to the public audience.13
9
Ibid., 3.
Joel Parker, “Representing a Lifetime with a Few Lines of Text,” Student Paper, WRD 112 (University of
Kentucky, October 9, 2013), 2.
11
Ibid.
12
Ibid.
13
Sarah Coffman, “Making Oral History Accessible with OHMS,” Student Paper, WRD 112 (University of
Kentucky, October 10, 2013), 1–2.
10
360 | BOYD ET AL.
Coffman continues,
For example, when Bologna is referring to his grandfather’s “fruit business” I had to recognize that he was actually referring to his grandfather’s
participation in the economy as a small business owner. I was able to
establish this connection by adding “small business,” and “Detroit,
Michigan” as keywords, therefore, creating the metadata necessary to link
researchers to this point in the interview.14
Overall, students found it most difficult to determine appropriate key words
and to do the “translational” work that enabled them to understand and communicate the broader themes via key words, but they found the time invested
to be well spent. As one student, Jon Fish, put it, “The value that this indexing
has in the preservation and dispersion of this oral history makes the work involved a worthwhile endeavor.”15
Another student, Ashley Cutshaw, elaborates even further:
Despite the challenges I faced while doing this assignment, it was rewarding to complete it. My work, and my classmate’s work, is going to be available for everyone to use. By completing this assignment, our class could
have helped someone write a newspaper article or a book. It makes it
worthwhile to know that we are making these interviews accessible to everyone to really take advantage of.16
She went on to point out
when choosing keywords, you can’t just think about what you found important. You have to be somewhat objective and ask yourself, “If I was a
researcher, what in this section would I find useful?” You have to listen
over and over again, think about what the interviewee is really talking
about and sum that up into just a few words. Not only was it hard to find
what was important, but it was also hard to be the person defining the
“important” parts of someone’s story. . . . Everyone will have different
opinions on what is significant so it was difficult to differentiate between
the things that I personally found important and the things that could be
important for everyone.17
14
Ibid.
John Fish, “Honesty in Indexing,” Student Paper, WRD 112 (University of Kentucky, October 9, 2013), 1.
16
Ashley Cutshaw, “My Issues with Oral History Indexing,” Student Paper, WRD 112 (University of Kentucky,
October 12, 2013), 1–2.
17
Ibid. Emphasis in original paper.
15
Indexing as Engaging Oral History Research | 361
If the assignments sound ambitious, it is because they were. They required
students not only to think about their own writing but also to work on the
meta-level, categorizing the topics someone else spoke about. Students engaged in meaningful writing with real-world implications beyond the classroom,
and as suggested by the student reflections above, like most things in the socalled real world, such writing is messy and requires the careful negotiation of
competing interests. Yet if student reflective papers are any indication, students
in the honors section enjoyed the public aspects of the work, even if the assignments brought a unique set of challenges to instructors, the Nunn Center director, and students alike.
Rachel Dixon, Undergraduate Student,
University of Kentucky
I originally registered for Dr. Fernheimer’s WRD 112 class as a way of fulfilling
my university’s first-year writing requirement. When I walked in the classroom on
the first day, I knew very little about the content of the course, aside from my
assumption that it would entail drafting a lot of papers and honing my writing
skills. I imagined days filled with textual analysis, research summaries, and paper
editing—days that would prove to be, I was certain, familiar and within the
bounds of everything I had experienced before in an English class. However, I
was surprised to soon discover that our semester’s work in Writing Ethnic
Lexington would focus less on the written word as I understood it and more on
the rhetorical choices that go into crafting a written artifact. The bulk of the
course focused on oral history and its methods, and we were tasked with analyzing, indexing, and thereby increasing the accessibility of the Nunn Center’s interviews for future researchers. The benefits of this new course were many and
varied. Through this process, I not only discovered new aspects about my hometown but also revised my perceptions of what constitutes research.
The opportunity to see a new side of my native Lexington really stood out
to me while in Dr. Fernheimer’s course. After spending eighteen years in the
same house, on the same street, in the same city, I thought I knew all there was
to know about Lexington, Kentucky, and the Bluegrass State. However, the
Nunn Center’s Ethnicity in Lexington (Multi-culturality) collection completely revised my perceptions. When first assigned the 1985 oral history of William
Sutherland Reid (https://goo.gl/JRy6zx), a Scotsman who started Lexington’s
first bagpipe band in 1975, I had no idea that Scottish culture is alive and well
in Lexington. I was oblivious to the fact that his namesake band contributes to a
lot of the traditions we Lexingtonians hold dear, like the annual St. Patrick’s Day
parade. As I poured over Reid’s interview to pull out key words for the OHMS index, I discovered my own connections to local Scottish history. I saw that though
362 | BOYD ET AL.
the larger perception of Lexington in Reid’s interview was quite different from
my own, many of the names, events, and geographic markers his oral history repeatedly emphasized are the same things connecting me to the city. Places I
had visited many times in a personal context, such as Bryan Station High School
and Mary Queen church, were suddenly tied to Reid, his band, and my understanding of history. Lexington was illuminated in a new light as a result of the
attention to detail required by the indexing process.
Although my hometown ties to the oral history project initially hooked my
interest, the lessons that I learned about OHMS and its place in the research
process were the takeaways that enriched my experience with indexing even
more. The task we were entrusted to complete was both innovative and challenging. It forced me to learn about the OHMS system and use it to create an
index that would make Reid’s interview more searchable and accessible. Though
I was initially terrified by the prospect, I found the system to be more userfriendly than I anticipated. The end goal of the project was to produce a written
representation of the verbal hallmarks of this man’s interview—an index which
functions, simultaneously, as a table of contents as well as a set of segment-level
tags and annotations, connecting researchers to the insights within the
interview.
It was empowering to have the agency to locate key terms and themes
within an oral history and clarify them for future listeners. I had the power to
create the map of the interview and knew that it was my job to perfect its guide
so that individuals would be interested in and steered towards Reid’s story.
Though audience members across the United States and beyond may not initially tune into an interview from a little-known Kentuckian, they may be more
intrigued if its index shows that it includes music references or descriptions of
ethnic communities in cities outside the Bluegrass. Suddenly, through such key
terms, the audio interview becomes both searchable and accessible. By mapping
Reid’s natural language to broader concepts, I was able to garner wider appeal
and flexibility for his oral history. Eventually, the interview was not just specific
to Lexington, but also had a virtual script of larger contexts and terminologies
affecting multiple avenues of research simultaneously: immigration, cultural preservation, Scottish heritage, intergenerational assimilation, and more.
The value gained from completing this project appeared just as much in abstract concepts like a change in my personal academic mindset as it did in concrete benefits like the creation of a tangible index for the interview. Through
learning about oral history and OHMS, I witnessed the mutability and subjectivity of the entire research process. When dealing with humans and their interviews, stories differ widely. I saw this most clearly when teaming up with three
other classmates to create a collaborative podcast about the larger narrative told
by our four oral histories. Each recording contained the story of a man from
Lexington, each of whom was a member of a specific ethnic group that called
Indexing as Engaging Oral History Research | 363
Lexington home. However, their individual views on the community and cultures
within varied a great deal. While one Scotsman argued for the importance of the
pipe band to help achieve cultural preservation, another (Graeme Fairweather;
https://goo.gl/pb431w) dismissed the music group as a potential detriment to
the “authentic” Scottish identity. Additionally, while many of the men favored
the expression of their ethnic roots, one (Michael T. Romano; https://goo.gl/
LftBi5) preferred to keep his foreign heritage hidden—hinting, perhaps, at
latent external racism or pressure to assimilate during the 1980s when the interview was conducted. With all of these competing narratives, it is difficult to discern a single truth. Putting the various interviews and indexes in conversation
with one another illuminated this fact.
The final lesson that I learned from the indexing process came as a commentary on argumentation in general. In choosing what to highlight about
Reid’s interview, it became clear that I could never completely divorce my perceptions from the message the man was trying to communicate. What indexers
deem important about these oral histories is a rhetorical act in and of itself.
Though some key words used in the indexes are objective—geographical labels,
foreign terms, and holiday names, to name a few—other labels are crafted solely
by the indexer. When I chose to frame a specific segment of the Reid interview
in terms of “assimilation” or “cultural preservation,” for example, I was not using
words directly from the interviewer or interviewee. In many cases, such outside
categorization can be dangerous because it can feel as though the indexer is
putting words into the interviewee’s mouth, and yet, this translational move is
necessary so that the concepts the interviewee describes (perhaps without using
words that would be familiar to a broader audience) are what make the interview
most valuable from a researcher’s perspective. This tension between the demands of the assignment (to find and create valuable key words) and my desire
to stay true to the person’s words and the identity claims they represented
made the assignment both challenging and valuable. It ultimately underscored
the importance of the indexer’s job to interpret the message within any given
clip and translate it as accurately as possible onto the final index. Indexers, then,
engage in an act of translation, for they both distill a message that they hear
and create an index that uses personal decisions and arguments to fill in any lexical gaps.
The responsibility to accurately represent Reid’s story was one that did not
fade at the close of my WRD 112 class. My semester-long interest in this musician’s tale blossomed into an independent research project that led me to his
surviving daughter and grandson, Sandy and Will Reid.18 I now know that the
18
To read more about this project, see Rachel Dixon, “More than Just Hot Air? Oral History, Cultural
Rhetoric, and the Creation of Lexington’s Scottish Bagpipe Heritage,” Young Scholars in Writing: Undergraduate
Research in Writing and Rhetoric 12, no.1 (2014): n.p.
364 | BOYD ET AL.
greatest benefit of indexing is one that is perhaps too easily overlooked—that
of the real connections forged between students and history through the medium of analyzing everyday voices.
Conclusions
OHMS enables professors, students, and archival professionals to learn more
about how each participates in both the process of producing and representing
knowledge and making such knowledge available and searchable to public audiences. Not surprisingly, these parallel paths intersect in the act of indexing.
Students’ involvement in the creation of indexes helps to both shape, represent,
and make others aware of the topics the interviewees discuss while also making
the students more aware of the way such knowledge is produced. The indexing
assignment(s) put students in the position of those who process historical information, and this position enables them to think about the way micronarratives
are connected to macronarratives and historical trends. Consequently, indexing
encourages students to think critically about what and how they write, which
causes them to reflect upon and be more aware of the ways writing is epistemic.
Just as the process of creating indexes helped students to become more aware
of the ways writing participates in the production of knowledge, the incorporation of OHMS in the classroom allowed the Nunn Center to learn from and with
the students about how such work can be done on a larger scale with more diverse groups of students. While it would not be surprising to have students in
history or library science classes engaging with oral history archives in this way,
the incorporation of first-year writers shows that OHMS and its pedagogical appeal are broader than initially imagined.
From the Nunn Center’s perspective, much was learned from working with
Professor Fernheimer and WRD 112 and 205 with regard to effectively utilizing
OHMS in a pedagogical context. The Nunn Center needs to be more nimble and
efficient in working with professors on campus who are interested in using
OHMS as a classroom exercise. We experienced challenges in quickly preparing
the requisite collections and making them accessible for student indexing.
Specifically, both collections were originally recorded on audiocassette and they
needed to be digitized before they could be indexed in OHMS. In fall 2013
when the collaboration took place, the importation of metadata records into
OHMS was a manual process, slowing down the time necessary to prepare interviews for indexing in OHMS. Based on our experiences in this collaboration, the
Nunn Center made workflow, programming, and design adjustments to the
OHMS system. Such adjustments included enhancements to the import module
as well as enhancements to the workflow management aspects of OHMS, which
allow it to more easily become a platform for wide-scale, sustainable, pedagogic
implementation. In other words, if faculty wanted to make oral history and
Indexing as Engaging Oral History Research | 365
indexing the focus through which an entire first-year writing curriculum taught
high-level information and digital literacy, for example, OHMS is now equipped
to serve more than two sections of writing courses at a time. Finally, the Nunn
Center greatly enhanced documentation about the indexing process, publishing
its evolving guide, “Indexing Interviews in OHMS: An Overview” on Oral History
in the Digital Age (http://ohda.matrix.msu.edu/2014/11/indexing-interviewsin-ohms/), and producing numerous training videos made available on the
OHMS website (http://www.oralhistoryonline.org), including Using OHMS to
Index Oral History: A Detailed Tutorial (http://youtu.be/PvfweBl586g), to facilitate training and efficiently communicate important nuances implicit in the process of indexing oral histories.
Such documentation enables professors to teach the value of indexing
without requiring the presence of OHMS’s creator, Douglas A. Boyd, to present
such material each time. Consequently, OHMS can become a pedagogical platform that reaches beyond the University of Kentucky, available for use by any
faculty member who wishes to include indexing and OHMS in his or her
classroom.
From the pedagogical perspective, students were exposed to and gained
access to otherwise little known aspects of Lexington history. More than that,
they actively participated in making this history broadly accessible to a wider audience of scholars, researchers, and interested laypeople by completing indexes
and audiocasts. Perhaps most importantly, they learned how writing can be used
effectively and how to make writing accessible to a broader audience, while also
making connections to the constructed nature of history that is expressed in language. In the honors version of the course, WRD 112, more than fifty percent
of the students’ projects were accepted for broader presentation at the National
Conference on Undergraduate Research (NCUR), which was held at the
University of Kentucky in Spring 2014. These first-year students, most of whom
were not writing or English majors, were able to participate in the broader scholarly conversation themselves when they presented the oral history-based work
they did for class at this national conference. As detailed above, at least one student went on to continue work with oral history, ultimately learning more about
its methods and conducting interviews of her own. The independent research inspired by this initial exposure led to her publishing her findings in the University
of Missouri-Kansas City journal for undergraduate research and writing, Young
Scholars in Writing.
As demonstrated in the student responses above, students using OHMS to
index oral history interviews in a classroom setting are not just tagging interviews with disparate key words. Indexing involves critical engagement with content at the segment or story level of a lengthy narrative, requiring deep listening
and understanding as well as critical assessment, interpretation, and interpolation. It is an ideal way to engage students in a careful consideration of audience,
366 | BOYD ET AL.
Fig. 2. OHMS: Oral History Metadata Synchronizer (http://www.oralhistoryonline.org/
documentation/).
as they both imagine and become researchers thinking about the myriad ways
such oral histories could prove valuable to a scholarly audience. Employing the
OHMS indexing module in the undergraduate classroom places students into the
position of actively and collaboratively researching, critically interpreting, and
publicly representing individual narratives. More than that, OHMS helps them to
better understand the ways that historical narratives are based on access, representation, and a series of complex choices that affect the composition of history.
In the introduction of the book Oral History and Digital Humanities: Voice,
Access, and Engagement, the editors Douglas A. Boyd and Mary A. Larson state
that “new models” are emerging “providing contextual frameworks to encourage
Indexing as Engaging Oral History Research | 367
more meaningful interactions with researchers as well as with community members.”19 In the chapter, “‘I Just Want to Click on It to Listen’: Oral History
Archives, Orality, and Usability,” Boyd underscores the need for “archival access
to oral history . . . to be granular and precise in order to be most useful.” To best
accomplish this outcome, “the archival community must work together with the
oral history community to explore, adapt, and innovate.”20 When students become part of this community, they are no longer limited to being consumers or
interviewers of oral history. Instead, the integration of OHMS into the classroom
provides an innovative model for encouraging students’ deep listening and critical engagement with oral history, offering educators an experiential learning
model that effectively connects students to the archive. More importantly, this
pedagogical model engages students in actively producing knowledge, composing history, and participating in the metaprocesses through which we come to
know what we know.
Douglas A. Boyd directs the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History in the University of Kentucky
Libraries. He is the coeditor of the book Oral History and Digital Humanities: Voice, Access, and
Engagement, he led the Oral History in the Digital Age initiative, and he is the designer and creator of OHMS. E-mail: [email protected]
Janice W. Fernheimer is associate professor of writing, rhetoric, and digital studies and director
of Jewish studies at the University of Kentucky. She is the author of Stepping into Zion: Hatzaad
Harishon, Black Jews, and the Remaking of Jewish Identity (2014) and the coeditor of Jewish
Rhetorics: History, Theory, Practice (2014). In collaboration with author/illustrator J. T. Waldman,
she is currently researching and writing a historical fiction graphic novel, America’s Chosen Spirit,
based on oral histories that detail the Jewish influences of the Kentucky bourbon industry. Along
with her research collaborator Beth L. Goldstein, she is collecting oral histories for the Jewish
Heritage Fund for Excellence (JHFE) Jewish Kentucky Oral History Project, a repository of oral
histories for Jewish Kentuckians. E-mail: [email protected]
Rachel E. Dixon is a junior at the University of Kentucky, with a triple major in English, Spanish,
and writing, rhetoric and digital studies. A native Lexingtonian, she is deeply interested in the diverse stories found within Kentucky and the modes of preserving them for future generations.
Upon completing her undergraduate study, she plans to pursue a master’s degree in the field of
rhetoric and composition. E-mail: [email protected]
19
Douglas A.Boyd and Mary A. Larson, “Introduction,” in Oral History and Digital Humanities:Voice, Access,
and Engagement, ed. Douglas A. Boyd and Mary A. Larson (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014), 5.
20
Douglas A. Boyd, ‘“I Just Want to Click on It to Listen’: Oral History Archive, Orality, and Usability,” in Oral
History and Digital Humanities:Voice, Access, and Engagement, ed. Douglas A. Boyd and Mary A. Larson (New
York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014), 94.